This month marks six months since Prolific North was established, following its launch on Monday 14 January. A lot has been crammed in to this short space of time, with two awards ceremonies, a new Postgraduate Certificate in Digital Communications Management in association with MMU, innovative research and advice initiatives and of course many news exclusives and jobs.
We hit the ground running in January and we’re really grateful for how quickly
the Northern creative industry embraced the new offering. We now have over 30,000 unique visitors to the site every single month (source: Google Analytics) and subscriptions to the daily e-newsletter have increased to more than 15,000 – with open and click-through rates well above the industry average. In this short space of time, we’ve also gained almost 2,200 Twitter followers.
Prolific North was launched to provide a news, information and resource service for creative industries professionals and marketers across the North – and those advisers wishing to engage with these two groups of professionals.
And all the feedback and activities to date suggest we are clearly delivering
and in the process have established Prolific North as the leading news website of its kind outside London.
Our core news team comprising David Prior and Stephen Chapman and supported by Nick Jaspan and freelance contributors, generates around 60 stories a week in addition to a growing number of feature and opinion pieces – and we’re increasingly breaking important stories with recent examples including the Businessdesk.com changing hands and Delhi-based NewsX establishing a new UK broadcasting operation with Asian Lite.
All being well, the editorial team will grow further in the coming months.
Our two inaugural Awards initiatives: the Prolific North Awards and the Northern Marketing Awards attracted almost 1,000 guests between them and we are confident that the two will continue to grow strongly in coming years. The Prolific North Awards which we held in May will be by some distance the largest gathering of senior media and creative industry professionals in the North in 2013.
We have also started spreading our wings in areas which we feel offer additional value and interest for our readers.
Our first annual Top 50 review of companies in our targeted sectors addressed PR agencies and was published in June with support from the eWord and Mustard Research and two further Top 50 rankings in related areas will be published this autumn.
We will also be publishing and publicising a ground-breaking new research initiative this autumn – in association with our partners Midas, the BBC and Creative England – examining multinational and international investment in the creative/media sectors in the North.
Last week we went live with Prolific Advice, an innovative new service which
offers owners and senior managers online guidance to a variety of business
issues from our panel of three leading professional advisers: Lucas Fettes, Tree Accountancy and Turner Parkinson.
Our Postgraduate Certificate in Digital Communications Management, delivered in partnership with MMU, is creating quite a stir (positive that is!) and subject to validation on 2 September, the first course will start on Thursday 7 November.
Commercially the company is also developing with the appointment of former
editor and Trinity Mirror director Mark Dickinson as Prolific North’s chairman
and Jill Taylor joining to head up our commercial engagement.
If you would like to explore the growing number of opportunities we are creating to engage with the North’s most senior and influential creative and media folk, please contact Jill at jill@prolificnorth.co.uk
And finally we’d like to thank you our readers for the time and interest you are
clearly affording Prolific North.
If you have any comments or feedback you’d like to share with us, be it ways we might improve our news or delivery or if you feel we are not devoting sufficient coverage to a particular area or sector, please get in contact with us.
Our two key journalists are David Prior at david@prolificnorth.co.uk and Stephen Chapman at stephen@prolificnorth.co.uk
Jill Taylor can be contacted for jobs and banners.
The publisher of Prolific North, Nick Jaspan, can be contacted at
nick@prolificnorth.co.uk and our chairman Mark Dickinson can be found at
mark@prolificnorth.co.uk
